


Slipping Through My Fingers

by shewhoguards



Category: Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-13 00:10:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7130270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewhoguards/pseuds/shewhoguards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The difficulties of sharing your daughter with Peter Pan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slipping Through My Fingers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



“Mama, watch me dance! Watch, mama! Are you watching?”

It was less a dance than it was a wild flurry of limbs; Jane leapt, bounced, fell over and ended with a proud flourish, confident that her mother would appreciate her artistry no matter what. Wendy applauded dutifully, then held her arms out to her daughter. The cuddle was brief – too often they were nowadays for at the heady age of two Jane had little patience for remaining still in her mother’s embrace. All too soon the child was squirming to be free again and Wendy released her reluctantly, resisting the urge to clutch her close and try to hold to her childhood just as tightly.

“Oh, I wish you could stay like this forever!” she mourned as the child escaped from her lap, and for a moment heard her own words as though there were an odd echo to them. Jane turned to look back at her, her expression for a moment surprised, and then thoughtful.

“But I can’t,” she said, as though testing a new concept. “I can’t, mama, I have to grow up!”

Two is, after all, almost always the beginning of the end.

*

Jane was five when Peter first came for her, and Wendy spent a week hoping and praying that the pull of pirates and mermaids would not be so strong that her little daughter would fail to return. The relief at hearing small fingers at the window was indescribable.

Jane, for her part, had spent her week cheerfully forgetting about her anxious parents, happy that such things would take care of themselves. She was untroubled by guilt as she climbed back into her mother’s lap. Perhaps, though, something in Wendy’s face prickled the child’s conscience for she stayed in her arms a little longer than usual, stumbling for a justification as to why she had needed to go.

“Without me,” she explained, her small face serious, “I don’t believe he would take his medicine or rest after meals or anything. He does so need a mother!”

“He does,” Wendy agreed softly. She refrained from telling her daughter that the instinct that made her feel in such a way was the same thing that would lead to Peter turning away from her some day, that the thing he loved best in boys was their carefree irresponsibility which is best found in the young but the quality he sought in girls was that of taking responsibility for others which is learnt as we grow. That unfairness was something Jane had time to discover for herself; it would be too cruel to explain it now.

*

The passing of years goes like minutes to mothers, who must be forgiven for such eccentricities as trying to wipe their grown children’s faces clean of food because they can still see the soft dimples of their baby smiles hiding in their cheeks. Jane was seven when she came to her mother with a solemn face, her fist tightly clenched around some hidden treasure.

In silence she laid the small white tooth in Wendy’s hand and it took Wendy a moment to identify the source of sharp pain that entered her heart at the sight. The loss of the first baby tooth, the event that Peter Pan had never and could never experience.

“If I grow up, he won’t want me any more,” the girl observed soberly. “I shall have to be careful. Do you think he will notice?”

Would he? Wendy wondered that herself. Certainly, if he did he would be enraged, but noticing would mean Peter acknowledging a reality he didn’t like and that was something the boy was not fond of doing.

“You are only a baby still,” she reassured her daughter, even as she tucked the tooth safely away deep into her pocket. There might be fairies in the world interested in teeth, but not all their intentions were benevolent ones, particularly when it came to stray girls in Neverland. “There is plenty of time yet.”

And yet, somehow she could hear the clock ticking so loudly that it was as though a crocodile was near, swimming through an ocean of time towards a bittersweet destination she knew all too well..

*

No child needs the influence of Peter Pan to believe him or herself immune to harm. Wendy spent the usual amount of time preventing her daughter from doing such ordinary things as patting a dog which assuredly wanted to eat her, or wandering into the path of a carriage and being trampled. Such tasks make up most mothers’ daily routine; indeed they become so used so saving their children from things which are actually dangerous that eventually they come to see even perfectly harmless things like spiders as dangerous.

And then, very often overnight, the children somehow reach a point where not only can they be harmed but they find it difficult to believe that their parents have survived to this point without their intervention.

“Mother!” Jane would say, startled and horrified. “You must be more careful lighting the fire! You might have set your skirt alight!”

Or it would be “Mother! Are you sure you cook meat enough? We learnt at school that improperly preparing it can make you _very ill indeed!”_

And as mothers do, Wendy laughed, and promised to be more careful, and refrained from pointing out that she had been cooking a good many years without poisoning anyone at all. Partly – mostly, even! – it was a relief to observe that her small daughter was becoming more responsible and no longer needing supervision to keep herself alive.

Even as she felt that relief however, something deep inside of her whimpered at realities she did not wish to acknowledge. Time was running out.

*

When Jane was twelve, Wendy was waiting for Peter as he hopped through the window, raising a hand to hush him before he could wake her daughter. For a moment he seemed about to spring away again, wary of any adult and their intentions, and then he recognised her.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said casually, although Wendy did not miss that his hand had fallen to the little dagger he wore at his waist. “What do you want?”

“Peter,” she began cautiously, “do you remember when I grew too large to fly away with you?”

For a moment he looked startled, and Wendy would have sworn she could read sadness in his eyes, the regret for great adventures passed that could never be relived. Perhaps though, that was only her own wishful thinking, for a moment later he was laughing, and the mockery in his tone cut like knives. “Fly away? With a great grown thing like you?”

“When I was small,” she said insistently. “When the fairy dust still worked. Peter, you must remember! We defeated Hook together; don’t you remember Hook and the crocodile? I was your mother!”

But he looked at her so blankly that she almost questioned her own memories except the moment when the sparkle failed to lift her into impossible flight was etched into her mind with sharp clarity. “Jane is my mother,” he said slowly. “Who is Hook?”

“He was a pirate!” Wendy heard her own voice rising in frustration. “Peter, I gave you a kiss!”

Almost, he smiled at that, his lips raising faintly at the corners as he reached instinctively for a pocket where once, perhaps a thimble had been hidden. Almost, she could swear, he remembered her. 

But it was too late. Jane was already stirring, and her cry of delight as she sat up to see Peter was edged with something that had never been there before –this fondness was different. “Peter!” she called, and was quickly out of bed to go to him. Wendy watched the boy’s face fall as he realised that he now only reached Jane’s chest. She saw too the difference in the way Jane reached for him, almost as though she wished to pick him up. The change was irreversible. Where five year old Jane would have trusted Peter to lead her off a cliff and into the sky and sea of stars, twelve year old Jane would try to take his hand and lead him away from the dangerous edge and save him from himself. Wendy’s heart bled for the discovery she was too late to save them both from, as her daughter, her beautiful, clever, perceptive daughter followed inexorably in her footsteps.

“Peter,” she said gently, “you did know, didn’t you, that my daughter would have to grow up?”

 


End file.
